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 The '20s actually were just like this.
"Dudes in hats, machine guns, bullets, booze, and the kind of hot chicks you could still unironically refer to as broads..."
A time of bootleg, jazz and flappers. Where coffee costs a dime.
The setting of many an Agatha Christie mystery, this is one era that absolutely lives up to the stereotypes and then some. The Great War was over, (most of) the Western world had never been so prosperous - time to par-tay!
Style is almost exclusively Art Deco moderne, all minimalist lines and coolly fluid shapes. (Side point- Art Deco's fascination with streamlining household objects whose actual wind resistance is irrelevant proved popular because levelling incomes led for the first time to a group of people who could afford good design but not household servants. It seems that a streamlined Art Deco lamp is easier to dust than a frilly Victorian one...)
Dresses are short and so is ladies' hair. Bobbed hair had actually emerged earlier and was popularized during the earlier 20's, while hemlines gradually rose from ankle-to-calf-length in 1920 to knee-length by 1925. Despite those costumes you buy these days, not all dresses were fringed and figure-hugging, and above-the-knee hemlines were nonexistent at any time. Dresses had boxy and boyish silhouettes, dropped waists and were minimally or highly decorated depending on the occasion.
Characters include gangsters and G-men, flappers and their sheiks (sort of proto-metrosexual young males), languid white movie idols and jolly black jazz singers and dancers, and lots of cheery collegiate types who wear huge fur coats and play ukuleles while shouting "23 skidoo!" The basic idea was to shock, amaze and amuse at all costs; there were apparently some women of the era who would greet their guests in the bath.
The fun and excitement is only heightened by the fact that much of it is totally illegal, at least in the USA. There Prohibition is in full swing, so gin is made in bathtubs, smuggled by the likes of Al Capone and served only in 'speakeasies', hole-in-the-wall bars highly prone to raids by stolid, humourless cops, or an ambush by the eccentric Izzy And Moe prohibition agent team in disguise. Unless you're Eliot Ness or one of his Untouchables, be extra cautious to never insult a tough-looking Italian in a sharp suit, or you'll find yourself looking down the barrel of a Tommy Gun.
However, this growth of the influence of modern life in urbanized northern states ran headlong into more conservative communities, especially in the south which tried to keep modern influences out like the theory of evolution from their schools. The state of Tennessee tried to do so with the Butler Act, which banned evolution from school curriculums. The small town of Dayton, suffering from an economic slump, took advantage of this and persuaded the local teacher, John Scopes, to be indicted under this law in order to have a big publicity trial to bring in the tourists. The plan worked perfectly and the resulting trial proved to be one of the best covered and dramatic with the noted populist leader and religious conservative William Jennings Bryan facing off against the famed defense lawyer and noted agnostic lawyer being the highlight of the event. As it happens, the prosecution's win was never seriously in doubt, but the victory was Pyrrhic for religious fundamentalists with Bryan being publicly embarrassed by Darrow's questioning that forced him to concede that a literal interpretation the Bible was indefensible and he died less than a week later. The trial would immortalized by the classic play, Inherit the Wind, and its subsequent film adaptations.
As for entertainment, silent films starring the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton gained enormous popularity, though the fact that they didn't have sound meant that movies still hadn't killed off Vaudeville or Minstrel Shows just yet. The advent of sound later in the decade finished the job, however. Radio progressed quickly through the last of its experimental phases and was firmly established as a mass-market medium by the end of the decade, while ultra-low-def mechanical television had brief success with early adopters (essentially beta-testing it) before The Great Depression and the advent of (relatively) high-definition all-electronic TV killed it off by the mid-30s.
During all this, of course, the relics of The Gay Nineties, now doughty dowagers and grumpy old Colonels, look on disapprovingly, from short skirts and hair, to make-up and swimming wear.
One should also note that while things were just swell in America, Britain and much of Western Europe (where it was dubbed The Golden Twenties across The Pond), if you were in an area hard hit by World War I (say, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey or the entire Caucasus Mountains region before the Soviets annexed it) this was not a fun time. However, it doesn't mean that they didn't try, once they were able to pull themselves together again. But in Germany, there are rightwing paramilitary groups who have some very grand ambitions and there will be a few people who get a chilling feeling that one loudmouth Austrian with a toothbrush mustache is going to be very big trouble.
America's booming wealth and newfound importance meant that lots of American writers and intellectuals spent time in Europe during this period, soaking up Europe's old culture even as European thinkers dreamed of wiping it all clean and starting over. The contrast between "naive" Americans and "decadent" Europe set a fictional pattern which has endured nearly a century.
Soviet Russia (called USSR since 1922), after a devastating civil war, experienced a short period of economic growth thanks to the NEP (new economic policy), a series of reforms that allowed free enterprise and private property. A new Soviet bourgeoisie was born, with a penchant for over-the-top parties and a slavish fascination with American fashion, music and dance. The Soviet Nouveau Riche (typically called a nepman) was a stock character in 20's Russian satire. Rather funny, they left behind the most durable heritage in Soviet arts and design, as most Soviet architecture and industrial design from the 1920s to the 1970s was ludicrously similar to period American design.
Often a nostalgic setting during The Fifties, The Sixties, and well into The Seventies. This period lasted sometime after World War I till the Crash of 1929 or just before the New Deal of 1933. Understandably, there was much nostalgia for this period as soon as it ended, and a lot of 1930's movies (especially the gangster ones) were set during this decade.
For the 1939 movie of the same name, click here.
Also see: The Gay Nineties, The Edwardian Era, The Great Depression, The Forties, The Fifties, The Sixties, The Seventies, The Eighties, The Nineties, Turn of the Millennium, and The New Tens for more decade nostalgia.
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Twenties Slang This ain't baloney, this is Serious Beeswax, as most words and phrases originated from this decade, so here are some examples:
Popular tropes
Works set in this time peroid: Anime
Comic Books
Film
Literature
Live Action TV
Magazines
Music
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
Video Games
Webcomics
Western Animation
Other
Works made in, but not set during the twenties:
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alternative title(s): Roaring Twenties; The Golden Twenties; The Twenties; Prohibition Era; The Jazz Age
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